A large resource for patterns of verbal paraphrases

Abstract

Paraphrases play an important role in natural language understanding, especially because there are fluent jumps between hidden paraphrases in a text. For example, even to get to the meaning of a simple dialog like I bought a computer. How much did the computer cost? involves quite a few steps. A computational system may actually have a huge problem in linking the two sentences as their connection is not overtly present in the text. However, it becomes easier if it has access to the following paraphrases: [HUMAN] buy [ARTIFACT] [HUMAN] pay [PRICE] for [ARTIFACT] [ARTIFACT] cost [HUMAN] [PRICE], and also to the information that I IsA [HUMAN] and computer IsA [ARTIFACT]. In this paper we introduce a resource of such paraphrases that was extracted by investigating large corpora in an unsupervised manner. The resource contains tens of thousands of such pairs and it is available for academic purposes.